"But an establishment that neither does nor has her hope of doing work,
except for a few, and those few the portion of the community whose
claims to public aid is the smallest of all; an establishment severed
from the mass of the people by an impassable gulf and a wall of brass;
an establishment whose good offices, could she offer them, would be
intercepted by a long, unbroken chain of painful and shameful
recollections; an establishment leaning for support upon the extraneous
aid of a State, which becomes discredited with the people by the very
act of leading it; such an establishment will do well for its own sake,
and for the sake of its creed, to divest itself, as soon as may be, of
gauds and trappings, and to commence a new career, in which renouncing
at once the credit and the discredit of the civil sanction, and shall
seek its strength from within and put a fearless trust in the message
that it bears."
Such, then, were the reasons that led the defender of the Irish Church
to become its assailant, "That a man should change his opinions is no
reproach to him; it is only inferior minds that are never open to
conviction."
Mr. Gladstone is a firm Anglican, as we have seen, but the following
extract from his address made at the Liverpool College, in December,
1872, gives a fine insight as to the breadth of his Christian
sentiments:
"Not less forcibly than justly, you hear much to the effect that the
divisions among Christians render it impossible to say what Christianity
is, and so destroy all certainty as to the true religion.
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